Tired of directory and article submissions? Here are some tips for getting quality free links to your websites.

1. Profile Pages

Profile pages are essentially pre-sell pages. The links come from keyword rich pages (since you provide the content) and these links can include deep links. Depending on how the profile page is setup, the links may be located in the editorial block.

For example, both MySpace and Squidoo offer great profile pages. These profile pages are located one level off from the main domain. You can place multiple links within a large amount of text.

MySpace

Every account as MySpace has access to a profile page. Take a look at an example profile. Here you can see a decent amount of text with links sprinkled in the content, along with some nice anchor text.

Squidoo

Squidoo is even better. In addition to a profile section, Squidoo allows you to create individual topic pages called Lenses. Each of these lenses can be topic specific and include multiple links. Think of Squidoo lenses as hosted information pages. Here’s a quick example of a lense. Squidoo plans to share revenue with its lensemasters in the future.

2. Real Time Aggregators

Real time aggregators like memeorandum and megite are great for keeping updated with the latest news. From a SEO standpoint, sites like these represent a great vehicle for free links – provided you take the time to figure out how these sites rank.

Washington Post Trackbacks

The Washington Post supports trackbacks on many of their blogs. Similar to other trackback systems, they’ll toss you a link if you send them a trackback. With the immense number of blogs/content over at the Washington Post, you’ll find it fairly easy to come up with a blog post that is worth linking to. For example this one. (As opposed to straight out trackback spamming)

Memeorandum / Megite.com / Tailrank /Chuquet

These sites are real time aggregators – all run on different algorithms so you’ll have to take the time to figure out what works for you. A general tip, once you are in the system you can rehash whatever is on the front page and typically get a link.

Here’s a hint:

Megite works as the following:

Input:

a bunch of keywords, or a list of news or blog sites for a category

Process:

step 1) The sytem uses those keywords or the list to find more blogs or news site from the web. We called it data mining or auto discovery.

step 2) Some magic algorithm and ranking are used to discover the relevent and important blog posts or news.

step 3) learn from the discovered news and posts and infer more blogs and news site, then back to step 2) or output the intermedia results and push them to Megite web site.

3. Hosted Content

In addition to the big hosted blog sites like blogger, typepad, and wordpress.com – you can tap into other hosted content sites for links.

Gather.com

Gather.com is like an article repository that shares revenue with its authors. Here is an example Gather.com article.

The bonus with all these sites is that the better your content is, the better results you get. Better links, more natural traffic and in the case of Gather.com and Squidoo some extra cash too.